Featured Post

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Fiscal conservatives are the modern day Robin Hoods

Before its demise, while walking through the muddy turf at the grimy Occupy Toronto compoundnot so long ago, amid the accosting cacophony of signage, one could spot the inevitable placard calling for a "Robin Hood" tax. The call for a special tax on the higher income earners is a routine feature of demonstrations by anti-Capitalist, anti-Globalization activists, and the the notion of it betrays their misconception of economics and history. The premise behind a Robin Hood tax runs completely opposite to everything the outlaws of Sherwood Forest represented.

Steal from the rich and give to the poor was the mission statement that enshrined the Merry Men and their leader as heroes in popular culture. But who were the rich in the medieval Europe? It was the nobility, who were also the government. And what was the source of the wealth accumulated by the aristocracy at the time of the Plantagenet kings? It was taxes that the government forcibly extracted from the poor. Robin Hood retook the money that the government took away to be spent on items that fulfilled their own agenda, and returned it to the people, who could use it to feed and serve the needs of the private citizenry.

So who is it now that wants to stop the government's ability to force you to give them money, for which they account rather poorly and regularly squander? It's not the defunct Occupy Movement, or the tax-hungry New Democratic Party. They want to hand more money to the government and use that as a conduit to claim more of it for themselves. It's not the civil service unions, who want to raise taxes so that more of them can remain secure at the expense of the rest of the public.

Today's Robin Hoods are fiscal conservatives who, like their legendary predecessor, want to keep money out of the hands of inept bureaucracies and restore it to the hands of the people. Fiscal conservatives, like Robin Hood, believe that money belongs to those who worked for it in the first place so they can choose how to use it for themselves.

Medieval anti-Government Fiscal Conservative

The anti-globalization, anti-capitalist movement's profound ignorance is evidenced by their wanting to replace a system that has provided the most freedoms and prosperity in the history of mankind with a proven failure. The Marxist-based one they prefer has, every single instance it has been used at the governmental level, resulted in totalitarian dictatorships and national squalor. If you to do something inefficiently and incompetently with the worst possible outcome, there's generally no better way of accomplishing that than to hand the job over to government. That is precisely what the anti-capitalist backers of the failed Occupy Movement want to do.

The only resemblance the anti-Capitalists in the Occupy Movement had with Robin Hood and his Merry Band was that they lived in outdoor encampments. But that's where the similarity ends. In reality, they, and the political actors like those in the NDP who support higher taxes, are acting as proxies for our Sheriff of Nottinghams and King Johns who want your money for their own selfish purposes.